Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, believes that Apple's upcoming iOS 11 update this fall will provide a huge boost to the emerging AR industry.
Sweeney's company is the maker of the Unreal Engine toolset, which can be used to create some large budget 3D projects. In this week's blog post, he outlined why he thinks this is a huge immersive computing moment:
Apple's debut of VR-enabled Mac and AR-enabled IOS is a real game change. Although there are millions of VR enthusiasts today and other companies' early AR hardware has reached thousands of developers, Apple is bringing this powerful technology to hundreds of millions of consumers.
I believe this is the beginning of Epic's struggle for and building the mainstream VR and AR revolutions for many years. This is the most important event. It marks the transformation of high-end technologies and will provide the impetus for a new generation of world-class games and storytelling.
I believe that this is indeed the beginning of the mainstream VR and AR revolution we are pursuing. We have been fighting for it for many years. This is the most decisive event, marking the development of high-end technologies that will drive a new generation of world-class experiences beyond games and stories.
ARKit's integration with the two major game engines, Unity and Unreal Engine, now allows developers to build applications on hundreds of millions of Apple products. Some of the tools that developers have used before, Sweeney believes that Apple can accelerate the adoption of AR.
In an interview with Foreign Media UploadVR, Sweeney said: “Apple has joined the mainstream trend at an appropriate time and is fully prepared for it. From the discussions of developers, we know that there will be a large number of developers working with us. You will soon see a lot of investment in this technology."
Sweeney suggested that the VR market is small, and it is difficult for the team to prove that the massive investment in VR content is correct, but AR is already available on hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads. This is an obvious potential investment opportunity. Of course, there are still major technical problems. For example, what is the multiplayer AR game? According to Sweeney, many technologies still need to be established to provide greater appeal for the AR experience.
Sweeney finally said: "This is a brand new entertainment experience. We will see a series of experiments, successes and failures. These are all built together."
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